Building the Xinwei Line was fairly easy, especially when it came to the earthwork for the roadbed. There were low hills everywhere nearby, so they could simply pick any small mound, shovel it flat, and be done.
Some overseers led their own Tuen specifically to dig soil nearby, then had it hauled to the construction site by horse carts for use in filling the foundation. The soil dug from the drainage ditches on either side of the roadbed could also be used to fill the foundation right there.
Since so many people were involved—thirty-two Tuen in all, each assigned to a different task—everyone went to lay the foundation on the first morning. They completed two kilometers of road, and that was only because they were unfamiliar with the work at first, making them seem somewhat slow.
Adding the section of road extending from the open ground outside the Locomotive Factory, by the time they stopped work at nightfall, the entire Engineering Team had already laid ten kilometers of roadbed.
After all, it was only a simple loess roadbed, and a single-track one at that. The rails were just seventy-five centimeters apart, the sleepers a little over a meter wide, and the roadbed only needed to extend a little farther on either side. Two meters in total was enough. There was no need to make it any wider—this was not a carriage road. Trains could only run along the rails; they could not sway back and forth.
By nightfall, a stretch of tents had already been set up in the wilderness beside the worksite. Some workers had no tents at all and simply crowded together on Straw Mats, then lay down behind a small mound of earth and fell into loud, snoring sleep.
Railway workers had always suffered the most. This